Safety and belonging : constructing a sense of belonging amongst young, middle-class, South African feminine bodies within an 'unsafe' place

Abstract

The affective dimension of belonging is theorised to involve feelings of being valued, safety, and agency. However, when applied to the lives of young South African women this conceptualisation falters and reveals its possible patriarchal underpinnings. The lives and belonging(s) of these women are engulfed by what Gqola (2015 & 2021) has aptly conceptualised as a ‘female fear factory’. As a result, this ‘factory’ seeming has instilled a constant awareness of (gendered) unsafety, and thus has made the theorised feelings of belonging appear more as ideals rather than emotive descriptions. In this study twenty young, middle-class, South African women were interviewed (approximately 60 minutes) about how their sense of belonging was constructed and how their experiences of (un)safety have influenced this construction. The interview transcripts were put through three rounds of analysis (thematic, dialogic/performance, and interpretative phenomenological) to produce a possible ‘master narrative’ of the feminine South African sense of belonging. The narrative that was (re)produced revealed that belonging was experienced as a sense of comfort which was curated by feelings of understanding, acceptance, and familiarity/similarity. This ‘comfort-belonging’ was complicated, or rather burdened, by the participants’ race, femininity, and unique sense of (un)safety. Critically, this unique sense of (un)safety highlighted how desensitised the participants had come to (gendered) violence. In turn revealing that feeling unsafe was an integral part of being South African, and thus belonging in/to South Africa. Therefore, this study not only puts forth a possible (re)conceptualisation, and complexities, of the feminine South African sense of belonging; but also illuminates a possible (re)construction of the sense of belonging which involves an unavoidable inclusion of unsafety.